On Friday we opened our new exhibition at The Fine Art Society which has been curated by Jeremy Deller who won the Turner Prize in 2004. Jeremy has brought together a small group of contemporary artists and shown them alongside works by Modern British painters with whom they have some sort of affinity. So Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Steve Claydon, Paul Noble, Tasha Amini, Stephen Fowler and others hang among some great English of moderns - Edward Burra, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Christopher Wood, John Piper and Walter Sickert.
This sort of mixing of contemporary and modern tends not to happen very often, for no very clear reason. I think there tends to be an assumption that what is new and cutting edge can have nothing in common with the past. And yet what is obvious in the exhibition is that here there are greater similarities than differences, and that among the artists Jeremy has chosen there is some shared mentality of expression or character that fits very well together. In part this is testimony to Jeremy's ability as a curator, and the naturalness of his skill at selecting works in sympathy with each other, be they ancient or modern. But it also seems to cut through the dividing lines of rigidly classifying art by period as historic, modern or contemporary or whatever, and to emphasise similarities and continuities rather than differences.
It seems to me there is some sort of comfort in all this. That despite being separated by decades or even centuries, art and artists can possess an affinity or empathy one with another. There is some continuous thread of human sympathy, and when we look at things ourselves, it is the same experience of recognition. I think it is probably just that which I have experienced when I've looked at early Renaissance frescoes by Giotto or Mantegna or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. Alongside admiring the artistic brilliance of what it looks like and how it's been made, there is also represented a truthful understanding of what it feels to be human, which transcends time and place. Is it the beauty of the water lillies people respond to in Monet, or is it Monet's tangible joy in them that he manages to communicate through paint to us? I think probably it's both.
Ultimately artists are attracted by visual material, and it doesn't matter what period of art it comes from. One of the features of our new show is an intriguingly surreal 'Plant House' in the form of a church complete with living plants which Jeremy has made. It is based on a watercolour that Eric Ravilious made around 1930, and neatly it brings together past and present.
The Strawberry Thief, 8-28 October 2011.